Ben Davis: How to Write About Art - A Little Theory

Ben Davis: How to Write About Art - A Little Theory
Quijote Talk
Thursday, October 10, 2019
This talk offers a personal theory of what it means to review art. It starts with trying to define the most basic fundamentals of what makes a review appealing, then tries to imagine what the deeper structure of a sound review is, and from defining these characteristics, works up to try to extract a theory of what the bigger purpose of this kind of writing is-why do it at all, what its social importance is, and what it's future might be.
Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket, 2013) and currently National Art Critic for Artnet News. He was an editor of The Elements of Architecture (Taschen, 2018), the catalogue to the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Recent essays have appeared in the books Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (MIT Press, 2016) and The Future of Public Space (Metropolis, 2018). In 2019, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab reported that he was one of the five most influential art critics in the United States, and the only one to write for an online publication.

[@TaliesinTT]

BEN DAVIS IS A TOTAL BADASS ! THANK YOU FOR THIS! SO MUCH TO DIGEST HERE. ROCK ON!

[@phoenixzd5409]

This is amazing on many levels.